Unravel
by hernameiseponine
Summary: Would Jack really shoot Ianto after "Cyberwoman"? And if he won't, what will he do? Jack and Ianto, obviously, but the whole team comes out to play a part. May be one-shot, may be longer, I haven't decided.
1. The Execution

**Unravel**

A/N: Aren't we all fascinated with Cyberwoman, at least a little? So much goes unsaid and unseen, except for a suspension that may or may not even be canon, we never learn about the consequences. You could fill an episode with the fallout…so I've made in attempt at a little filler.

This can definitely be multi-chapter if anyone wants it to. I have a few ideas for proceeding forward. Reviews are always appreciated!

Ianto still knelt on the cold floor. After his initial scream of grief, he had fallen silent, frozen by the body of his dead love.

The team, at a motion from Jack, had filed wordlessly out of the basement room. Upstairs, Jack addressed the others. "Go home."

"Jack…the bodies…" Tosh offered tentatively.

"Will be dealt with later. It's been nearly twenty-four hours. Get some sleep. All of you."

Gwen practically ran for the door. Tosh looked at the CCTV monitor that showed the cyber conversion unit and all the damage it had left behind. Damage that, at this point, probably included Ianto. But there was nothing to do about that tonight, and so she left, too.

Owen remained where he was. "I'm not going, Jack.'

"Owen, so not the time."

"Jack, I should be here. You know that. For… whatever," Owen finished cryptically.

Jack glared back at him. "Fine." He knew very well what _whateve_r meant. _Whateve_r meant, _to serve as a witness for an official Torchwood execution_. It wasn't a formality Jack had planned to bother with, but if Owen felt like it, then that was fine. "Come on."

Neither of them spoke on the way back down to the basement, which was good. Jack had thought Owen might argue about it. Owen would have done the same thing for his fiancée without even blinking. And Jack would have had to shoot him, too. Because sometimes, love just doesn't seem like an adequate excuse.

Ianto was now sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, his head in his hands. When he heard Jack and Owen come in he looks up, stared at them for a moment, then slid his back up the wall and got to his feet. Such quiet grace in a doomed man. _(Jack had always been attracted to that quiet grace, that dignity. When coupled with one of Ianto's shy, teasing smiles, the desire produced in Jack had been nearly uncontrollable)_.

Jack walked over to face Ianto. "I told you," he growled.

Ianto's voice was nearly inaudible. "I know."

No begging. No protest. _(Ianto never liked to make a scene. He always preferred flitting around the edges, invisible but integral in the lives around them, finding joy in anything he could do to make their lives easier or make them smile)_. Just was well. There was no need for this to be any more unpleasant. Jack didn't want to do this. But our actions have consequences

Holding the gun to Ianto's head was surprisingly intimate. Having power over anyone's life was intoxicating. With Ianto, whose coy flirting had slowly been driving Jack crazy for weeks, but had proven a surprising challenge to seduce _(never resistant, but never fully present; appeared to enjoy himself and at the same time never seemed to really pay attention)_ it was coupled with a fierce and pulsing desire. Jack wanted to throw him on the floor, to take him over and over again, unstopping and merciless, and let that serve as penance.

Of course he didn't. While his work at the Time Agency had given him an appetite for causing pain, it had mostly faded, and he fought against it every time it resurfaced. That was the worst version of himself.

"Just do it, sir." A voice quavering broke into Jack's fantasies and he awoke to the realization that he hadn't pulled the trigger. "Just be quick," Ianto said again. As much as Ianto was attempting to control it, fear was writing itself across Ianto's face. "Please. At Torchwood One it wasn't always quick."

The quiet horror of that phrase – _it wasn't always quick_. He really had been planning to shoot Ianto. But he couldn't now.

"No," he said, to one in particular. As if to emphasize the point, he threw the gun to the floor and walked out, leaving them both standing there.

Owen came up to his office half an hour later. Jack was sitting at his desk, trying not to think about any of it. _(The light touch of Ianto's lips, playful venturing of tongues, until Ianto broke away and said, "I should order everyone's food", and Jack had grabbed his hand and pulled him back, kissing him until Ianto broke away again.''I should really order that food." "When was the last thing you ever asked me about my life? I clean up your shit and that's the way you like it." "I'll watch you suffer and die." "You execute her or I'll execute you both!" "We can be upgraded. Together".)_

Owen spoke. "I checked him over. His blood pressure is sky high; he's been running on adrenaline for days. He has a few bruises from when that thing threw him across the room. Cracked rib, concussion. I'll take him back to my apartment. Someone should watch him overnight."

Jack was facing out the window, his back to Owen. "Keep him here. I'll keep an eye on him."

"You would have shot me."

Jack turned around to face him, looked him in the eye. "No. I wouldn't have." And realized then that he was actually telling the truth. He could no sooner kill a member of his team than he could kill himself.

"Jack. I'm not saying you should have shot him, all right? But you have to do something." The tone of Owen's voice and the look on his face conveyed how serious he was. It was always a bad sign when Owen was serious.

"I know," Jack responded. "I will."

"OK. Well, like I said, keep an eye on him. I'll check his BP again in the morning."

Owen walked out onto the floor and grabbed the jacket slung over his chair. "Call me if you need me," he said and walked out the door.

When Owen was gone, Jack left his office and went up to the roof of the hub. A pale daylight, tinted with pink, was just beginning to spread over the city of Cardiff, but the citizens remained asleep. The city had come so close to being destroyed by a Cyberwoman because of an employee mistake. Almost impossible to believe.

_You're going to have to do something_. A terrible mistake made out of love by a marginalized employee. Accidental near-deaths of his team. A shattering blow to the sense of their unity as a team – if, for Ianto, that unity had ever existed to begin with. A valuable person whose whole life was torchwood, a person none of them felt they could trust now. And an egregious betrayal to the sense of closeness that Jack and Ianto had built – or thought they had built – with their secret, stolen liaisons. Yes, it was going to be so simple to unravel _this._

And below, Ianto knelt again and the cold floor, trying in his mind to redraw the lines between the living and the dead.

A/N #2: If you have any idea for what Jack will do, let me know. I have ideas, but haven't made a decision yet.


	2. The Aftermath

Ch 2:

It was some undetermined and unholy time of the morning. Ianto had slept for over 24 hours. Now, waking up a full night later, he sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands.

_What was I supposed to do, Jack?_ He wondered. _Kill her? OK, but when? When all I could see was the smoke and all I could hear were her screams? Afterwards, surrounded by the bodies, when we were just glad she was alive at all? When she was asleep and powerless, connected to that god-awful machine? Or tonight, when I still couldn't see anything but Lisa, my Lisa, every time I looked at her, even though the world was falling apart?_

The fact that he couldn't know the answer didn't make things any better. Because he should know the answer. He should have been able to find an answer. Because of him, the team would always think of Lisa as the one who tried to kill them. Not the hard-working Lisa who showed him that Torchwood could be more than a job, or the flirtatious Lisa who convinced Ianto to go out with her, or the brave Lisa who fought off a Cyberman while Ianto constructed an escape route. Only Lisa the machine.

Ianto didn't blame the team, or Jack, or even Lisa. He only blamed himself.

He didn't want to sit in this gray, windowless room with its hard bed and metallic walls any longer. There must be something he could be doing upstairs. He couldn't piece things back together, so he might as well pretend they weren't broken. Who knows? If he did that for long enough, he might, for one single moment, forget about Lisa and about the sick, gaping emptiness within him.

When he emerged from the lift Jack was staring out at him from the window above. Gwen was with him. Ianto wondered at that for a moment, then decided not to bother. Gwen came and went as she pleased.

Ianto stared back at Jack. He knew he should go up and say something. Or grovel. But he couldn't. He meant to, but he found himself frozen beneath Jack's stare, unable to do more than nod. _I'm still going to work here. I mean, if you want me._

Jack nodded back at him. _I do._

"You would never have shot him, not really." "Have you ever loved anyone Jack?"

He had wanted to say, _Gwen Cooper, bloody gorgeous Gwen Cooper, please shut your bloody gorgeous mouth. _

He didn't tell Gwen that she was right in her assertion that he would have never killed Ianto, because that would require admitted how close he came to it. And now, after twenty-fours had passed, Jack's head had cleared, and the Hub was quiet and safe, Jack was shocked that he'd even considered it. He'd felt so outraged and betrayed that he'd actually gone down to the basement with a gun and thought about pulling the trigger. He didn't even recognize himself in the memory. He wasn't that person. But while he'd gotten a lot better about a lot of things while travelling with the Doctor, his ability to think clearly in the heat of the moment wasn't exactly one of them. Just another reason to find the Doctor before he hurt anyone.

He hadn't known what to expect from his team's morale. Jack had autopsied and disposed of the bodies the previous day, while the rest of the team were at home, so at least he didn't have to cope with the ill will that could arise from assigning anyone that task. Ianto kept mostly to the archives; when he had to be upstairs, he made himself silent and invisible. Jack wasn't sure if any of the team had even gotten a proper glimpse of him. Tosh was busy with software programming; she may have been bothered, but she didn't let it show. Owen seemed to be on edge, as though he was waiting to see what Jack was planning, but aside from an offhand remark or two he carried on like normal. It was a surprise to everyone that, of the whole team, Gwen was the one who held the grudge.

"Why is he still here, Jack?" she demanded while he was out on the floor. Tosh and Owen turned to look.

"Because it's my decision. And you didn't seem to have a problem with it this morning."

"I was trying to be nice!" she shouted, gesticulating to highlight her point. "I thought he was about to be fired, and I was trying to be nice. But, no, apparently here at Torchwood you can't get fired!"

Owen said her name softly but she ignored him. "She attacked me!" Gwen shouted, turning her wrists inwards so her palms pointed towards herself. "I was the one she put in that Cyber conversion unit. She was one second away from taking everything from me. I almost lost my _whole life_. But it's OK, yeah? No one's dead so it's all OK?"

He stared at her levelly, in silence, as he usually did when Gwen had one of her outbursts. When she stopped yelling he held her gaze for a moment, then broke it off to look at Owen and Tosh. "Back to work."

He knew Ianto had heard Gwen. Maybe over the comms, or maybe in person, or maybe through some ingenious rigging of his own invention. But one thing Jack had learned was that Ianto owned this Hub in a way Jack himself had never imagined was possible. No one except for him could use it to keep secrets. It was like an extension of Ianto's body. (_Ianto's body, warm and soft beneath Jack's fingers. That first time together, in the archives, the only sounds had been the rattling of the radiators, a distant call of a Weevil, and Ianto's soft moans. Ianto's sweet-smelling skin, his intoxicating body, they allowed Jack to do something he hadn't done in a long time. They let him forget.)_

Owen came and found Ianto in the archives. "Come with me."

"Where?"

"To the medical bay. I need to look you over again. And you shouldn't be moving around with that broken rib."

Ianto closed in around himself. "You can't stop me."

Owen rolled his eyes. "OK, Ianto. Whatever. I promised Jack I would check your blood pressure again, so just come up to the medical bay, OK?"

Ianto didn't want to spend any time with Owen – or any of the team. He knew how they must feel. He had certainly heard how Gwen felt. And he couldn't blame them. He didn't want to see them, not when he had no words to offer and no way to make amends. A small and selfish part of him wondered if he owed them anything at all. He wasn't on their team; they had made that perfectly clear.

Of course, he did owe them, and he knew that. Plus there was the matter of what he owed Jack. Ianto was perfectly willing to hide in the archives for the rest of his natural life if it meant avoiding Jack. _("It was…good, sir." Just good?" And Ianto had smiled, a smile that was more of a lie than he should give his boss and still less of a lie than Ianto had meant for it to be. "Very good. ")_

"Right," Owen said after examining him. "You can tell me the year and the Prime Minister and you still know how to count, so I think you've recovered from the concussion. I don't expect you to fall on the floor unconscious or anything. You're right, I can't stop you from moving around, but try not to get into any fights, all right? Your pulse and BP are still higher than I want them to be. It's like you overdosed on adrenaline. I'm going to write you for some Ativan. It'll help. Here," he said, handing Ianto a small plastic cup containing white pills. "Take that."

Ianto stared at him. "Ativan is an anti-anxiety medication."

"You know, I do know what Ativan is, thanks. Just take the stupid pills. They can make you tired, so from now on take them at night."

He swallowed them and stared at Owen scratching away on a clipboard. (_He had hated the pleasure. Hated the thought that he was doing this for any other reason than Lisa and hated manipulating Jack. For eighteen months he had given only a part of truth and a part of himself to both of them, never knowing which one he wanted more and never able to cut either one loose.)_

"You don't have to bother. Just tell Jack you checked it. I won't bring it up."

"You know," the pen made a scratching sound, "I may be a twat, but I do like my job, and I like doing it well. So take that," he handed the piece of paper to Ianto, "and get it filled, would you? I've got to falsify medical records for the doctor and the pizza girl, so I've got enough extra work without calling the pharmacy to make sure you got your meds."

The paper dangled limply from Ianto's hand. "The bodies…" It was the first he'd thought of it. The thought hit him with an astounding clarity. (He had wanted so badly for it to be Lisa in that body. The blonde hair and the strange face didn't matter if he got even just one more moment with Lisa. But of course, it hadn't been Lisa. Just a machine employing the voice box of what used to be a nineteen-year-old pizza girl).

"Jack got rid of them. He did most of the work. Lisa's, too," Owen added.

"Why haven't you killed me?" Ianto sounded both gently curious and oddly detached. "You could have. You've had the chance. You could have told Jack I went for your gone. You could say you had no choice."

"D'you want that?" Owen asked. "Anyway, I don't think I've ever given you proper credit for how dramatic you can be." Ianto made no move to acknowledge the words, and for some reason Owen found that slightly annoying. "I'm pissed at you. We all are. It's not the same as wanting your head on a platter. Now leave, I have to get back to work," he said, and under his breath added, " you _child_."

At the door of the medical bay Ianto turned back to face Owen. "What's he going to do? Jack, I mean."

"I don't know." If Ianto hadn't known better, he would have thought there was sympathy in Owen's voice. "I really don't know. He hasn't told me. I'm sorry, Ianto."

"No, I-uh-it's fine-I mean, I, um - yeah." And he practically ran back to the archive.

He should have said, "What are you sorry for? I'm the Official Team Fuck-up." Better yet, he should have apologized. He should have taken the chance to apologize to Owen for everything.

But instead he had stumbled. He was always stumbling.

_("Well, you've only spent the last few weeks fetching me coffee and staring at me when you thought I wasn't looking. So yeah," Lisa had laughed, "I think I know you want to go out with me._" _And then months later: "Hey. What are looking at, handsome?" Jack had said, and then had given Ianto one of his uncomfortably dazzling smiles.")_

Owen's question continued to echo in Ianto's head. _"D'you want that?"_ And sitting in the dark archives, swallowing coffee laced with very strong scotch, Ianto was glad Owen hadn't waited for the answer. Because while Ianto didn't think the answer was yes, he couldn't swear it was no.


End file.
